This post was originally written for Medium. I’m far more active on there these days, so you can access all my posts by following me on Medium, or paywall-free by signing up for my newsletter.

Left to right, top to bottom: my best friend’s birthday, Patti, the beautiful dog I live with, walking across a frozen lake in Copenhagen, Paris in August, one of my favourite spots in London, at the top of a waterfall outside Cape Town, an art installation in London, and Paris in December.

It’s that time of year again: time for some self-indulgent self-reflection. If you’ve followed my work for a while, you might know that most of my blog posts start off as notes to myself, condensing lessons I’ve learned. Some I share, some I don’t.

Here are 39 of the most poignant, meaningful lessons from 2018 extracted from the many notes to self I penned this year.

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You are allowed to make happiness your main goal in life. You are allowed to put your own happiness first and to let that inform your decisions. You are allowed to make every effort to avoid things that make you unhappy or just neutral. You are allowed to pursue happiness like a dog pursues a rabbit: crazed, focused, intent.

While some people, by virtue of genetics and upbringing and luck and environment and a million other factors beyond their conscious control, find it easier to be happy and recover faster from setbacks, no one can just BE a happy person. Our moods fluctuate. All the time.

Be hard on yourself. Set your own standards and be the one to decide if you’ve met them or not. Don’t let other people dictate that. You can never please everyone, or meet everyone’s standards. But you can set your own, then focus on them.

If you can’t stop procrastinating on something you’ve chosen — spending time with a partner, studying, working on a creative project — you shouldn’t be doing it.

You don’t need to find yourself. Our selves are not a puzzle to be solved. We’re always changing. Every minute of our lives. There is nothing to figure out. There is no secret, buried identity to excavate.

The people whose twenties and teens are a riotous, joyous rampage are the exception, not the rule. There’s no evidence that these are the happiest times. Research generally indicates that people get happier as they age.

Education is not about school. Education is about what you choose to do when no one is forcing you. It’s about how you spend the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the evening. It’s about what you pursue because the idea of not getting better at it every single day is agony.